After reviewing a few of many fiascoes (he overlooked the Alvarez & Marsal contract for $15.8 million to rearrange bus schedules that left thousands of children stranded on the coldest day of the year)...

Yep, that is one of Klein's all-time great screw-ups, and I missed it; thanks for the catch, Diane. Here's her original post on this:

In 2006, then Chancellor Joel Klein gave a contract for $15.8 million to business turnaround consultants Alvarez & Marsal to reorganize the transportation program. Some of the executives were paid $500 an hour (plus expenses). On January 31, 2007, the buses adopted the A&M schedule for the first time. It was the coldest day of the year. Thousands of children were left stranded on bitter-cold corners. It was chaos.

Chancellor Klein defended the choice of A&M, saying they had saved the city at least $50 million.

Presumably, this is the system that the mayor now finds intolerable and outrageously expensive.

Also: here's a comprehensive look at contracting in the Joel Klein era by Adrienne Day.

*****

Thanks to Leonie Haimson and Lisa Fleisher, we now know that there is no accountability whatsoever at the top of the New York City schools: nobody gets evaluated, even as they scream for more test-based evaluations for teachers.

But there was one other part of Fliesher's story really caught my eye:

Joel Klein, schools chief from 2002 to 2010, said he received constant feedback from the mayor, and evaluated his team daily. "When a member of my team's performance wasn't up to standards, I didn't issue a report," he wrote in a emailed statement. Mr. Klein works for News Corp., which owns The Wall Street Journal. "They were terminated." [emphasis mine]

Oh, really?

- When then-Deputy Commissioner Chris Cerf violated city law by not disclosing his equity stake in Edison Schools, Inc - even as the company was doing business with the city's schools - was he fired? No.

- When the Comptroller found: "...gross cost over-runs by outside contractors hired by the Department that have cost New York City taxpayers over $720 million and denied students funds for basic supplies," was anyone fired? No.

Yes: he fired the school bus department's director of contract compliance - hardly a senior position. But only after the Daily News ran a series of stories detailing how incidents of abuse on busses had skyrocketed under Klein.

I have no doubt that NYC bloggers like Leonie Haimson or Norm Scott could keep going with this if they wanted. The truth is that Joel Klein's tenure as the Chancellor was rife with incompetence and unaccountability. He was happy to point the finger at teachers whenever possible, play the blame game with the union, and throw junior staffers under the bus when needed.

But Klein never held his senior staff - or himself - accountable for anything. In many ways, he is the personification of the corporate reform movement: a movement that refuses to take responsibility for its own many failings.

And let's not forget Klein's self-satisfied declaration that education was this generation's civil rights issue -- as he spent years distorting the City's test results to show that minorities were closing the achievement gap --a claim that was concurrently being disporoven by solid NAEP findings. The lack of accountability for a decade of lies by his press people and the damage being done to the kids cannot be forgiven.